There's No I In Team
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Brennan's newest intern, Dr. Oliver Wells, gets his comeuppance when his arrogant manner gets on Agent Booth's last nerve.


**There's No "I" In "Team"**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer: **_I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

* * *

Booth groaned inwardly the moment the sliding glass doors swept open to let him into the Medico-Legal Lab.

As he looked up, he saw the two of them standing on the forensic platform with a bony, brownish-looking pair of mostly-decomposed feet sticking out of their squinty little huddle. Across the broad, brightly-lit atrium, he saw Angela approach from the opposite direction with a navy-blue folder hugged to her chest. Their eyes met and he acknowledged her with a smile and an upward jerk of his chin as he made his way to the platform.

A series of muted electronic beeps heralded his arrival as he swiped his ID badge in the card-reader and bounded up the stairs in a single movement. He couldn't help but grin with pride as one of the huddled figures stood up from where she was hunched over the remains and turned to look at him. Brennan—his partner, the mother of his child and, for three months now, his wife—smiled back warmly.

She held his gaze for a few long moments as she let her eyes skim along the rugged line of his jaw, noting as he swallowed the way his Adam's apple dipped then settled into the "v" formed by the starched collar of his starched white shirt, the top button of which gaped open above the loosened knot of his dark blue tie.

No sooner had he met her smile with one of his own than the other individual on the platform, the gray-coated intern Dr. Oliver Wells, paused in what he was saying when he realized that his audience of one was no longer paying attention to him. Annoyed, he stood up with a throaty sigh and glanced over his shoulder, his brown brows furrowing over his eyes as he gave Booth a disdainful once-over, shrugged and turned back to the Brennan.

"There's a pattern of wear on the epicondyle," he said. "See?" He pointed a gloved finger at the decedent's elbow. He studied the bone for a moment. "Definitely a case of epicondylitis." Glancing over his shoulder at Booth, he smirked and said, "Also known as 'Tennis Elbow.' That's the layman's term." The agent's jaw hardened, shifting forward slightly as he regarded the scraggly-bearded intern with a rigid stare, but he held his silence. Unfazed, Wells turned back to Brennan and continued. "Although the condition is somewhat obscured by the remaining soft tissue, together with the markers on the shoulder joint and the other muscle attachment points, I would surmise that this individual was athletic and played either tennis or a bat-sport like baseball or cricket."

Booth saw Brennan's eyes narrow briefly then blink, a look he recognized as silent but poorly-shrouded skepticism.

"I'm not sure about that," she said, walking around to the other side of the table. "For one thing, while you are correct, Dr. Wells, that this decedent clearly suffered from epicondylitis, what is colloquially referred to as 'Tennis Elbow' is lateral epicondylitis and _this _man's epicondylitis is obviously centered on the medial surface of the epicondyle, which makes his condition in fact an example of 'Golfer's Elbow' rather than the more well-known laterally-focused condition. It's not just associated with golfers. Bowlers, too, can suffer from medial epicondylitis."

Wells sucked in a sharp if not clearly audible breath and blinked. Brennan met Booth's twinkling gaze for a fleeting second and gave a faint, almost undetectable shrug, then began to speak again before Wells could even could open his mouth.

"Furthermore," she said, pointing to the victim's right heel, "there are substantial osteophytes on both calcanei." Booth arched an inquisitive brow and cocked his head to the side, soliciting a faint smile from her. "A heel spur," she clarified. "And while baseball players, like runners, can develop inferior calcaneal spurs as a result of chronic plantar fasciitis, this individual's heel spur is a posterior growth. See?" She rotated the foot and stroked her fingertip over the jagged surface on the back of the heel bone. "This is where the Achilles tendon attaches to the bone. Posterior calcaneal spurs are the result of chronic inflammation of the Achilles tendon, which is a far rarer condition than plantar fasciitis. A golfer or bowler would be no more prone to this type of injury than a normal person."

Her pale gray-green eyes narrowed again as a smile spread across her face, and Booth felt a warmth in his chest as he recognized the flicker in her eyes as a sign that she was putting the pieces of information together in her mind. She was onto something. Angela, too, recognized it moment she walked up onto the platform. The artist exchanged a look with Booth and took her place alongside him at the foot of the examination table as she waited for her friend to reveal her discovery.

"This man wasn't a tennis or baseball player, or a golfer, for that matter," Brennan said with a knowing grin. "The co-occurrence of medial epicondylitis and a posterior rather than inferior calcaneal spur is quite unusual."

Brennan let an awkward silence hang between them for a second or two, wanting to see if Wells would jump in and say something. She looked across the table at her husband who merely flashed his brows in expectation, clearly holding back a smirk as he nibbled the inside of his lower lip between his teeth to keep from laughing out loud.

"He was a mountain climber," she said. "Both these injuries are very common among alpine climbers, but rarely occur together in other people. That, along with the wear markers on his shoulders and back suggestive of someone who is used to carrying moderate-sized loads on their back, leaves little doubt in my mind that this person was an alpine climber and backpacker."

Angela shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she inventoried the wide-eyed expression on Wells' suddenly-pale face.

"Well, that makes sense," the artist said, her voice tinged with a snicker as she set her file folder and tablet computer on the edge of the table and, with just a few swipes of her finger. "Using cranial measurements and extrapolating a little on the basis of race, I developed a rough sketch of the victim's face and, together with the height and estimated weight you gave me, ran the whole thing through missing persons."

Booth stepped backwards, shoved his hands into his pockets and waited for Angela's big reveal.

"Meet Anders Reader," she said, holding up the tablet up to show the trio a photograph of a dusty-haired, stubble-faced man in his early forties wearing a curious ethnic-looking, round-topped wool cap with a wide, rolled brim, a North Face parka and a backpack with a snow-capped mountain range behind him. "He's a freelance travel writer and blogger," she explained. "Or, he was, I guess. Reported missing six months ago by his literary agent after missing a publishing deadline."

Brennan angled her head and studied the photograph for a moment, then turned to look at her partner and was surprised to see his dark brows deeply furrowed and a glassy expression in his normally warm, bright brown eyes.

"What is it, Booth?" she asked with a waver in her voice. Noting the worry and puzzlement bleeding through on the edges of her friend's voice, Angela, too, turned and looked at the quietly stunned agent. Brennan reached over and touched the cuff of Booth's suit jacket. "Do you—?"

Oblivious to the others, Wells' blue eyes suddenly brightened. "That's the Hindu Kush," he said, the glum frown on his bearded face quickly replaced by a proud, defiant smile. "The mountain range behind him in that photograph is the Hindu Kush. He's probably in Kashmir."

"No," Booth said quickly. "I mean, yes, that's the Hindu Kush in the background, but he's not in Kashmir." The agent fell silent again and continued to look at the photo, seemingly mesmerized by the image.

Wells narrowed his eyes and his nostrils flared. "I've been to Kashmir. I did a semester abroad at the School of Legal Studies at Himachal Pradesh University while I was in law school, and I'm fairly certain that the topography behind him is—"

"You're wrong," Booth said firmly, shaking his head as Angela handed him the tablet. "He's in Afghanistan. What you're looking at there is the western edge of the Hindu Kush viewed from the north."

His cheeks flushing, Wells pointed at the screen with a gloved finger, only to have his hand quickly batted away from the screen by Angela, who scowled as Wells refused to even acknowledge her as he turned to the older man. "I'm sorry, Agent Booth," he said with a crooked grin, "but I'm quite familiar with the geography of central Asia and—"

"You don't know shit, kid," Booth interrupted, quickly snapping his darkened eyes up to meet Wells' own. "That's Afghanistan. The snow on those peaks like that tells you it's late fall, and the angle and tint of the light on his face is obviously afternoon sun. That hat? It's called a _pakol _in Pashto, and they're everywhere in that northern part of Afghanistan. Most Pashtun men own one." He paused for a moment, blinking a couple of times as if blinking away a memory, then took a breath and turned to Brennan with an almost sheepish grin before the seriousness descended once more over his face. "It's got that funny little brim like that because they can keep their heads warm and do their prayers, leaning over to press their heads on their prayer mats without losing their hats. He's in Hazarajat area, right there in the central highlands of Afghanistan. Looks like Bamiyan Province, if I had to guess."

Wells shook his head, stunned both by the fact that he had, in fact, been corrected and, moreover, by a man with far less education and a dramatically less acute intellect than his own.

"Of course," he said, stepping back from the table and crossing his arms in front of his chest. "The Buddhas of Bamiyan were carved into the faces of a cliffside in Bamiwam in—"

Again Booth cut him off. "The Pashtuns call them _de bámiwám botán_," he said. "I know a Pashtun guy from that area who was actually watching from the other side of the valley when the Taliban dynamited 'em in 2001. His father was an _ulama_—"

"Oh!" Wells jumped in, raising his index finger up as if he were a lecturer about to begin a discourse for a section of graduate students. "I would imagine his father was no big fan of the Buddhas, seeing as how an _ulama_ is scholar of _fiqh, _that is, Islamic jurisprudence, particularly..."

Booth rolled his eyes and handed the tablet back to Angela. "Yeah," he breathed, a certain distance in his voice that made Brennan's brows knit slightly with concern. "Mohib's father was the chieftain of his village and had been assassinated by the Taliban six weeks before that for voicing his opposition to the regime." Pressing his lips into a firm line, he walked behind Wells and leaned over his shoulder, cocking his head to one side before he smirked and grunted out a sardonic laugh. "I spent ten weeks in the next valley over in 2010 teaching thirty Afghan farmers how to be snipers," he said, letting every bit of the darkness he felt bleed through in his voice. "Taught 'em to kill a man at five hundred meters with a single shot using scoped AK-47 rifles they got off the bodies of dead Russians twenty years earlier." He grunted again and shook his head. "How 'bout them fuckin' apples?" he whispered.

Wells swallowed and uncrossed his arms, unnerved by the sensation of Booth's breath on the side of his neck. "I—"

"You know what?" Booth asked him, stepping back and walking around to the other side of the table again. "You're smart, and you've read a lot of books, and racked up a nice stack of fancy degrees, but you don't know shit if you think that you're the only person that knows anything, or that the only way to know anything is to learn it the way you have."

Angela's face light up with glee that flashed and dimmed again when Brennan quietly cleared her throat and nudged her with an elbow.

"If you're gonna make it here, kid," he said with a smile. "Lemme give you a tip. Even the biggest brainiac around here—who, just so you know, sure the hell ain't you—knows that she doesn't have all the answers and that we all bring something to the party. Every damn one of us. That's the bottom line. It's how we make this thing work. And if you don't learn to shut that yap of yours once in a while and listen, you'll have to find yourself a new gig."

Brennan beamed, shrugging away a shiver at seeing her partner and husband give a thorough dressing-down to her newest and most obnoxiously arrogant intern. Angela tucked her tablet and file folder under her arm but held back despite an overwhelming urge to break out in a round of applause.

"Just a little tip from me to you," Booth said with a grin, letting himself reap a bit of psychic revenue after hearing all of his wife's complaints from across the dinner table since the morning Wells first darkened the door of the Royal Diner.

"Email the name and other details to me and I'll get someone over at the Hoover to run a list of contacts for Mr. Reader," he said to Angela with a wink. He smiled and placed his hand on the small of Brennan's back as he gave her a chaste peck on the cheek. "Don't forget," he told her before dropping another, longer-lingering kiss on her temple. "I got hockey practice tonight so I won't be home 'til 8:30. I'll pick up falafel for dinner on my way home."

Scratching his beard, Wells watched the scene in front of him play out with an awkward gape. "I, umm…"

"Just don't be a douche," Booth said, pausing at the top of the stairs as he called to him over his shoulder. "There's not a person here who could solve any one of these by themselves. The quicker you figure that out, kid, the better off we'll all be."

And with that, he turned and jogged down the stairs, greeting Camille Saroyan as she passed by him on his way out the door.

* * *

**A/N: **_After watching "Lady on the List," I decided that Wells needed a smackdown. What did you think? Don't keep me wondering. Let me know. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please leave a review._


End file.
